Planet Of The Killer Apes

Undiscovered

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Society & Culture, 805813, Science, History, Friday, Studios

4.6 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Apartheid-era South Africa, a scientist uncovered a cracked, proto-human jawbone. That humble fossil would go on to inspire one of the most blood-spattered theories in all of paleontology: the “Killer Ape” theory. According to the Killer Ape theory, humans are killers—unique among the apes for our capacity for bloodthirsty murder and violence. And at a particularly violent moment in U.S. history, the idea stuck! It even made its way into one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Until a female chimp named Passion showed the world that we might not be so special after all.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported WNYC Studios.
0:08.3	Hey everyone, we are back again with another episode this week.
0:12.4	We're still on the theme of We Were Wrong about science that we or some of us used to believe in and how we changed our minds.
0:20.5	Here it goes.
0:21.8	So, Ella, you have seen the opening to 2001 A Space Odyssey.
0:26.8	A long time ago.
0:28.5	Yes.
0:29.1	Okay.
0:29.6	Chimps gathered around an obelisk?
0:33.1	Monolith?
0:34.0	Monolith?
0:34.9	Yeah.
0:35.2	All right.
0:35.5	So I'm going to refresh your memory.
0:37.0	This movie starts on a kind of rocky desert landscape.
0:40.3	We're watching an ape.
0:42.3	He is squatting in the dirt, kind of snuffling around next to this pile of animal bones.
0:50.3	And then suddenly he pauses, cocks his head, looks at the pile of bones, and has a world-shattering idea.
1:03.9	What if I used one of these bones as a weapon?
1:16.8	Bapa! Bapa! as a weapon. And sure enough, in the very next scene,
1:19.3	you see this confrontation between two groups of apes.
1:23.0	And, oh, our ape buddy wax one of those apes in the head with a bone.
	...

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